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Firefox Mozilla Software Upgrades Technology

Firefox 40 Arrives With Windows 10 Support, Expanded Malware Protection 113

Posted by timothy from the does-make-it-over-the-hill? dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 40 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include official Windows 10 support, added protection against unwanted software downloads, and new navigational gestures on Android. Firefox 40 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Changelogs are here: desktop and Android.
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Firefox 40 Arrives With Windows 10 Support, Expanded Malware Protection More

Firefox 40 Arrives With Windows 10 Support, Expanded Malware Protection

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  • Still not as good as Google Chrome... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jcfandino ( 2196932 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @11:33AM (#50294313)
    because Chrome version is 44. This is 10% better.

  • alternative browsers, Opera? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @11:34AM (#50294323)

    After using windows 10 edge i felt that without ad blocker was useless in this ad ridden web, so which are the options?, a slow and bloated firefox, or the alphabet privacy nightmare and memory hog Chrome.

    I installed the latest Opera and was surprised, is fast, based in chromium so is very compatible and has the gestures and usual goodies of every opera install, it is even a universal app in windows 10, so it looks great too.

    For me Opera is my alternative browser for years to come

    • +1 for Opera

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sd4f ( 1891894 )
      I use opera, as it's my least hated browser. When I ditched FF due to Australis, the newest version of Opera was missing quite a few features. Still annoyed at the bookmarks handling, it's not good at all, can't export them to a file (for easy backups). Also, a few right click commands were missing, however I can't remember what they were now, I think it was opening a link in a new tab, but looks like it's there now.

    • I installed the latest Opera and was surprised

      So was everyone who used the pre-chromed Opera.

      I'm still on Opera 12. Nothing can replace it just yet.

      • I'm still saddened by the discontinuation of the Opera 12.xx line of browsers, but eventually came to the conclusion that Opera is the actually the best of the Chromium-based browsers that I found. Though nowadays I do most of my browsing in Pale Moon.

  • After 40 variants... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OMG, When Firefox one came out we used to to view webpages. 40 major revisions plus numerous increments we can still view the same webpagf but with a much larger footprint. Have we really gained anything worth while over 40 major revisions.
  • No, not fuck.

    According to the screenshots at TFA (iKnow, iKnow) upon install Firefox instructs the user to make Firefox the default browser. The button for opening the System Settings is not marked "Make Firefox Your Default Browser" but rather "Let's Do It!" which I suppose assumes that the user read the rest of the page. Did this get absolutely no testing at all?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Are you nuts? The heading above the button says "Make Firefox your default in three easy steps", but you need the button itself, right below that heading, to say the exact same thing?!!? This is your complaint? You expect every button in an application to have text on the button itself fully describing what it does? Jesus.

      • You expect every button in an application to have text on the button itself fully describing what it does?

        Yes. Most people only read what is on the button itself, if even that. Expecting them to have read the entire page to know what it is that they will be doing (it's not even mentioned in the page title) is too much.

        • Re:Let's do it! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Dahan ( 130247 ) <khym@azeotrope.org> on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @02:52PM (#50296055)

          You expect every button in an application to have text on the button itself fully describing what it does?

          Yes. Most people only read what is on the button itself, if even that. Expecting them to have read the entire page to know what it is that they will be doing (it's not even mentioned in the page title) is too much.

          No, I think it's just you... you must have a huge problem when using any GUI interface these days--"OK or Cancel? OK to what?? Cancel what??? I have no idea what it's talking about!"

          • No, I think it's just you... you must have a huge problem when using any GUI interface these days--"OK or Cancel? OK to what?? Cancel what??? I have no idea what it's talking about!"

            This is modded insightful??? For any non-degenerate case, the buttons OK and Cancel will be placed on a dialog that provides the context of what they are about, so their meaning can still be inferred from the whole interface they are connected with. If you are really interested in the scientific basis of how all this works, sear

  • So as part of the safe browsing it looks like all of the URLs you are going to and anything you download is being sent over to Google. I wonder what they are going to do with them?

    • Re:All URLs are going to Google (Score:5, Informative)

      by new_01 ( 4014887 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @11:58AM (#50294527)
      Here's how to disable it. Not sure yet how this is implemented. https://support.mozilla.org/en... [mozilla.org]
    • No, only URLS that return executable downloads.

    • Re:All URLs are going to Google (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Xtifr ( 1323 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @03:46PM (#50296467) Homepage

      Debian just looked into this, while considering how to appropriately hack FF into Iceweasel. The URLs are hashed, and a partial hash is sent to Google. Google then sends back a list of dangerous URLs (if any) which match that partial hash.

      One can quibble about how long the partial hash should be (too short, and you waste time and bandwidth downloading lists of false positives all the time; too long, and Google may be able to start inferring which sites you're visiting by looking for patterns), but overall, it seems like an excellent compromise between the contrasting needs of security and privacy. Debian ultimately decided to keep the feature, and keep it enabled by default, which says a lot to me. But, of course, you can disable it in either FF or Iceweasel, if you're unhappy with it.

  • Also some improvements for Linux (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @11:47AM (#50294435)

    "New: Improved scrolling, graphics, and video playback performance with off main thread compositing (GNU/Linux only)."

    • After the upgrade, youtube is running a html5 player instead of the Flash 11.2 one. I wonder if it's related to that.

      If anyone knows how to tweak or disable the HUGE "warning" that youtube is running in full screen, I would like to know. Huge ass bold fonts get old real quick. On the plus side it seems able to play CPU-decoded 720p video in an overloaded browser, and the player's volume button is reliable.

  • Good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by T.E.D. ( 34228 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @11:49AM (#50294451)
    I did the upgrade to 10 (finally!), and now Firefox doesn't come back from sleep properly anymore. It gets weird visual glitches that look like refresh issues, and none of the tab gadgets are visible (or clickable). I pretty much have to kill it and restart it every time I wake my PC. Hopefully the "supported" version won't do that.

    • Did you install the latest patch this weekend?

      Sleep issues are not Mozilla related and a bug with RTM. I know patches get bashed here but for a bleeding edge beta Windows 10 it should be required as it will take a few months for it to bake.

      Sleep issues and video should be addressed in the latest rollup patch that came out yesterday.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

        At home, I'm a relatively "fat, dumb, and happy" user. I install updates when the application in question says there's one available, but I don't sit down at my desk after a long hard day a work and troll the support websites for all of the various applications on my computer looking to see if there are new versions/patches available.

        Which is a long way of saying, "probably not". Mozilla hasn't advised me of a new update since I did the Win10 upgrade a couple of weeks ago. So unless it does it automaticall

        • I meant Windows patches. Windows 10 RTM had bugs like you described

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

            I meant Windows patches. ...

            Oh. I have Windows patches set to download and install automatically. So if there was one, I should have it. Again, I don't have time to play sysadmin and pick and chose when to install patches (and certainly not to recover from a breach on an unpatched machine). I'll go check just to be sure when I get home, but I damn well hope the auto-patcher is working.

  • Thoughtful tweaks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dstyle5 ( 702493 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @11:52AM (#50294485)
    We’ve made thoughtful tweaks to the interface to give Firefox a streamlined feel. You’ll also notice bigger, bolder design elements as well as more space for viewing the Web.

    Translation: We tried to hide more buttons and functionality from users with Firefox 40, but in the end people complained about the lack of a field to enter addresses into and the removal of the back button. Users, tsk, tsk... Rest assured that in the future we will continue to add more useful buttons and features like Pocket and voice chat.

    Regards,
    The Firefox "UX" Team

    In all seriousness the "new look" for Windows 10 doesn't look all that different from FF 38 that I've been using for months in the Tech Preview. I can't wait to try and find what other menus, options and functionality they have "designed" out of FF 40.

    • Re:Thoughtful tweaks (Score:4, Insightful)

      by westlake ( 615356 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @12:43PM (#50294893)

      Translation: We tried to hide more buttons and functionality from users with Firefox 40

      Monday, the geek will post about wanting a no-frills browser that "just works."

      Tuesday, he'll post about wanting more menus, options and functionality. Which most users won't have a clue how to configure and won't want to deal with.

      ------

      For those unaware of Pocket:

      Save web pages for later with Pocket for Firefox [mozilla.org]

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You make it sound unreasonable, but let's take a closer look.

        Monday, the geek will post about wanting a no-frills browser that "just works."

        I don't hear "geeks" asking for a browser that "just works." I hear them ask for browser makers to step messing around with the UI and to step adding more and more bloat.

        No-frills, a web browser. Not a VoIP-Client, Media-Player, 3D-Engine hybrid or email client. It should display websites.

        On that note, websites should stop trying to be applications. They suck at it and

        • I want to read web pages too, but ever since Google Maps and other maps that work the same way, people want or need programs that run in the browser not just documents.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Mousit ( 646085 )
      The "new look" actively ignores the Win10 system colors settings. FF39 had darker window borders because that's what I set my accent color to in my Theme. I figured out how to override that stupid fucking "all titlebars must be white" shit that Win10 enforced too, so I could have properly dark titlebars. So my whole Win10 system is dark-themed as I prefer. FF39 handled that just fine and matched the system theme settings like any other application.

      FF40 ignores all of it. It enforces the white window
    • Not seeing the version number of extensions unless you specifically click "More Info" is the most obvious one thus far.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Incoherent headling (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @12:00PM (#50294541)

    "Firefox 40 Arrives With Windows 10 Support, Expanded Malware Protection"

    That seems like a contradiction, given what I've read about Windows 10.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      It is a bit bloated and you have to install it from DVD now. It is called LinuxMint so the name has changed but once you get it installed there will be a handy quick launch icon for you to use. Now if we could just get the repos to carry the new version of Opera... Fortunately the latest beta versions install the PPA all nice and easy for you.

  • Let me check... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Yep. There are still 3,215 bugs over 5 years old that aren't fixed and 40 bugs with over 50 votes that aren't fixed, but "hey guys, we're new and improved with a look more closely resembling the browser that's kicking our ass." Also, every release more and more people turn off automatic updating because they get sick of having some new "feature" sprung on them that reduces their privacy or makes Firefox less usable.

    • Re:Let me check... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @12:17PM (#50294675)

      I've found bugs in Firefox that date back to not only before it was called Firefox but before Firefox even existed.

      My personal favorite is this bug [mozilla.org] which is over 15 years old now. The practical effect is that if your screen resolution ever changes, Firefox breaks and you have to restart it. (Basically tooltips start appearing over the wrong areas and anything that's supposed to not go off the screen uses the wrong screen values.)

      A practical example of why that might happen is projecting, say, a web app in a meeting. Doing that means you have to restart Firefox after hooking up the projector and then again when done. Another example is docking a laptop. 15 years with absolutely no progress.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Khyber ( 864651 )

        "I've found bugs in Firefox that date back to not only before it was called Firefox but before Firefox even existed.

        My personal favorite is this bug [mozilla.org] which is over 15 years old now. The practical effect is that if your screen resolution ever changes, Firefox breaks and you have to restart it."

        In what, Linux? I don't have that happening in Windows with dual or triple monitors when I load up a game that isn't native-resolution. I haven't had that happen even in Windows XP.

  • East to block most malware (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @12:05PM (#50294583) Homepage

    Don't allow any downloading from any link that is flagged as an "AD" on google.

    99% of the time I have to clean someone's computer it's because, "I searched for XXX and installed it from the first link from a google search."

    Google sponsored links from a search needs to have dark red borders around them with "WARNING DO NOT CLICK ON THIS"

  • "Improved scrolling, graphics, and video playback performance with off main thread compositing (GNU/Linux only)," the release notes say.

    Via Softmedia [softpedia.com]

  • They load by default and I don't know how to disable them. Another undesirable "feature" creeping in. Why am I not surprised that with every new update, I find myself thinking what they will have screwed up this time?
  • Still using Firefox, still prefer it over Google's spyware that has become a nasty resource hog. Just my two cents!

    • That stuff can be disabled, though, even when enabled in my opinion Chrome is still more secure due to the fact that the sandbox's value outweighs it. I do agree that the behaviour you mention should be at the most opt-in rather than on by default.

  • "The first of these changes .. consists of extending the monitoring of malicious file downloads to the Mac and Linux versions of Firefox."

    How do you get to execute malware under Linux from a Firefox download?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xtifr ( 1323 )

      Think worm-like, not virus-like. Things which hijack the already-running browser process, either directly through something like javascript or plugins, or through code hidden in malformed data that takes advantage of library bugs to smash the stack and hijack control (although this latter approach has been made much more difficult of late).

  • I mostly like FF design and functionality. But I am sick to death of the rapid point releases. Every few weeks, one more update, one more version number, one more download and install. Tried just going to reminder status, until that was hounding me to distraction too. I finally turned it all off. I still remember to check for updates, but I do it on my schedule, and only once per month or so.

    I realize Mozilla can be bothered to do their own final quality checking until someone else finds it in the fi

  • Expanded Malware Protection? Windows 10 Support? Does not compute - unless it means it doesn't run on Windows 10 now?

  • Firefox 1.0 (Score:3)

    by winphreak ( 915766 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @03:18PM (#50296251)

    I also remember when Firefox was toted as the light and speedy version of Mozilla.

    I remember when I could run Firefox on a USB stick with less than 100MB memory usage! And 200MB with the flash plugin!

    They've always had customization, addons, extensions, and everything else. As time went on however, in handling all those APIs, it slows down. Then, some of the addon authors slow it down even more. Maybe it's because they use Javascript for everything?

    I know this is a totally vague question, but it went from slim to bloated fast.

    • I know this is a totally vague question, but it went from slim to bloated fast.

      It rarely if ever has anything to do with the extensions or plug-ins. (From my perspective anyway.)

      On one side, they rewrite more of the browser functionality in the JavaScript.

      On the other side, they throw more and more memory to speed up the JavaScript executions, since it has become the bottleneck, since they decided to write more stuff in the JavaScript.

      As for the plug-ins and extensions, the whole concept of Fx (compared to the original Mozilla) was "let's outsource as much as possible functional

    • In Firefox 1's days the web was still made for Internet Explorer 5 and dial up users, so it was a lot faster and more reliable than today.

      But it's been only a few years that Firefox can e.g. open huge pictures or many of them without crashing.

  • Remember the big jump to Firefox 4? (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @06:04PM (#50297495)
    It took Firefox forever to get to 4. Now we are at 40. How soon until 400?

  • Firefox still woefully insecure (Score:3)

    by Eravnrekaree ( 467752 ) on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @10:04PM (#50298641)

    Firefox is still far more insecure than Chrome due to lack of a sandbox feature and multiprocess. Instead of spending so much time on pocket they needed to get the sandbox done. They should have had the sandbox in 3 years and are only dragging their feet on it being forced to keep up with Chrome on this matter.Still a very insecure browser. Total negligence. Whats ironic is they would mainly need to plugin into infrastructure that was already implemented for Chrome on Linux, as it was Chrome that pushed implementation of a process sandbox on Linux.

  • Sounds good enough to me! Hope it comes in red.

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